Free Down Sand Mountain by Steve Watkins Page B

stick it to Darla’s side. Then Mrs. Turkel went back to the old scratchy record player, which must have been the one in Darwin’s room, and put on a song she said was called “The Blue-Damn-You Waltz.” I stomped on Darla’s feet for a while, until I thought she was either going to cry or hit me, but then I sort of got it and said so to Darla, who said back, “Well, golly, I guess so, as hard as I’m having to back-lead,” and that’s when Mrs. Turkel said, “My goodness, look at the time. I do have to get back to work. You children keep practicing, but don’t wake up Papa. You know he needs his rest this afternoon; he had a hard night last night.”
    Darwin, who had been leaning in the doorway watching, snickered and said, “
Hard
-ly.” Mrs. Turkel gave him a dirty look and left the room.
    Wayne had told me their grandpa was a general in the Second World War and fought the Germans and all — it was another one of those things Wayne just seemed to know — but I didn’t believe a general would ever live in a town like ours, plus that didn’t explain why he never came downstairs.
    “Where does your mom work?” I asked Darla.
    She said Dr. Rexroat’s office. She was his receptionist. I said, “Oh yeah, I knew that already, I just forgot.” Darla said her mom had been there in the morning, but Dr. Rexroat always closed down for a while in the afternoons to take his naps.
    Darwin snickered again from the door. “He has to take his naps to sleep off his lunches,” he said, and he made a drinking motion and said, “Glug, glug, glug. Like old granddad.”
    Darla said, “Come on, Dewey. Help me pull these feet up off the floor.”
    Darwin mimicked her with a fake high voice: “Come on, Dewey, come on, Dewey.” Then in his regular voice he said I had to come on with him to help clean his room. I thought about those yellow sheets and his dirty rug and the stuff lying all over, almost as bad as their back porch, and I really didn’t want to go with him. And I sure didn’t want to play that game again, either.
    Darla said I had to help her, and we had to move all the furniture back, too, and anyway, Darwin should have to clean up his own room; she always cleaned up hers by herself. Darwin made scissors with his fingers and said how would she like it if he subtracted a few of those ringlets, Shirley Baby? He said it out of the side of his mouth like a gangster or something, and I couldn’t help laughing.
    Darla said, “Don’t laugh; you’ll only encourage him.” Darwin made more snipping motions, and said it, too: “Snip, snip, snip.” Then he started chasing her around their big dining-room table over by the wall. “Snip, snip, snip. Snip, snip, snip.” Darla screamed at him to cut it out and he said oh, he would cut it out all right, and he kept chasing her. I laughed until I had to sit down, and they kept it up until a door slammed somewhere upstairs really loud, and then they stopped like they had just gotten caught in a game of freeze tag. It was dead quiet in there, and I waited to hear footsteps above us, but there was just the echo of the door slamming, or maybe I just imagined there was an echo.
    Finally I said I had to go and I would help with everything next time. They didn’t even look at me, just stayed frozen like that, waiting, I guess, for their grandfather to come downstairs or whatever, not that I think he ever did.
    Everybody in seventh grade in the whole state of Florida took the class in Americanism vs. Communism, and nobody ever asked questions there, not even me. Our teacher was Mr. Cheeley, who had been in the South Pacific during World War II, which he kept reminding us, and who had these photos he let us look at — before and after pictures of a prisoner of war being executed: first the guy kneeling with his head on a hay bale and a Jap soldier standing next to him, with his sword raised up, then just the dead guy’s body on the floor on one side of the hay bale and his